


Won't Be Enough.

by CountlessUntruths (KaliCephirot)



Category: The Dresden Files - All Media Types
Genre: Missing You, probably not canon compliant by now, remembering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2016-12-16
Packaged: 2018-09-09 01:08:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8869861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaliCephirot/pseuds/CountlessUntruths
Summary: And sometimes, when they talk with each other, Maggie makes the questions Harry dreads.





	

Maggie calls him Harry. Not dad, nor daddy, but also, she doesn’t call him mister Dresden anymore, so Harry counts his blessings.

It’s not unkindness of her part or anything like that. But Maggie had a father in Guatemala, just like she had a mom and siblings, a family she still misses after three years.

Him being her birth father doesn’t erase that family. Even knowing the truth, Maggie is loyal to her own first, which, really, for Harry it’s pretty much an extra DNA test. But she still holds his hand as they walk to the park and she makes him Father’s Day cards and it’s okay. More than he deserves, really.

So when they talk he tells her the less scary bits about his life. He doesn’t mention everything that means being a Knight for the Winter, but she gets enough, from what Michael – uncle Michael an aunt Charity, for Maggie – speaks.

And then, there are times when Maggie makes the questions Harry dreads.

“What about my birth mom?” she turns to look at him with her dark eyes. She’s a tall kid: the most prominent thing she has inherited from him so far. “About Susan? I remember her a little, but…”

Maggie lets it trail off. Harry’s heart aches.

Susan, he thinks. How to say that she was his home, that even today thinking about her makes him homesick. About her laughter and courage, her curiosity. And then he stops a moment to hope that Maggie doesn’t inherit that, because he has already seen Maggie inherited BOTH their penchant for troubles.

You look like her, he thinks about telling her. The way your nose wrinkles when you laugh, your cheekbones. Sorry about the nose, ‘tho, kid, that’s all Dresden. He thinks about telling her the pg version of how they started dating, how daring Susan was when faced with danger. You look like her, he thinks again.

Maggie, who is all long limbs and dark hair and pouting lips and every time Harry sees her, truly sees her, he sees Susan as she once was… and then he remembers the dagger and how it cut through her flesh, remembers her blood. Remembers her dying in his arms. Remembers killing her and his heart dies all over again.

“She loved you,” he says instead, softly, not trusting his voice. “She loved you very much.”

Maggie smiles at this, a sad little twist of her lips before she asks something else, and Harry answers to the rest of her questions, her stories about school and about the Carpenter Children, all the while knowing that sometime soon, just saying that her mother loved her won’t be enough to answer Maggie’s questions, dreading the day when his daughter knows, or remembers, that each time she holds his hand, she’s holding hands with her mother’s murderer.


End file.
